STON2016
The cellular process responsible for providing energy for most life
on Earth, namely photosynthetic light-harvesting,
requires the cooperation of hundreds of proteins across an organelle,
involving length and time scales spanning several
orders of magnitude over quantum and classical regimes. Simulation
and visualization of this fundamental energy
conversion process pose many unique methodological and computational
challenges. We
present, in two accompanying
movies, light-harvesting in the photosynthetic apparatus found in
purple bacteria, the so-
called chromatophore.
The movies are the culmination of three decades of modeling efforts,
featuring the
collaboration of theoretical, experimental,
and computational scientists. We describe the techniques that were
used to build, simulate,
analyze, and
visualize the structures shown in the movies, and we highlight cases
where scientific needs
spurred the development
of new parallel algorithms that efficiently harness GPU accelerators
and petascale
computers.